


World Between Worlds

by objectlesson



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Benny and Dean make out on the forest floor, Incest, M/M, Mentions of Past Wincest, Purgatory, Season 8, Trauma, leviathan slaughter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-27 00:24:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean used to think that he was broken beyond repair. Now, he knows it with certainty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Between Worlds

**Author's Note:**

> Another Denny!! I love Benny's voice too much. I think that is the reason for this piece of fiction.

Dean’s fingers are slicked black. Hell, he’s black up to the elbow. Dripping with the familiar smell of things ancient, fermented. 

“The last of em’?” Benny says in his voice like Kahlua, machete still raised above his head, ready to be driven down into something. His voice never changes, not when they’re knee deep in Leviathan corpses, not when they’re out of breath from hiking over miles of purgatory with its steep hills and crumbling earth, not when they’re fucking and he asks Dean if it’s okay, if he’s too rough. The guy asks _Dean Winchester_ if it’s too rough. _In purgatory_. Dean shakes his head. 

“For now,” he says gruffly, wiping his palm off on the thigh of his Levis. Then, “Christ.” His forearm is burning from holding his own weapon up, forcing it through throats, spinal cords, between the wedged puzzle of vertebrae. He kicks the Leviathan head closest to him watches it bounce a few feet away. He’s about to propose that they bury the heads to buy them a few days, that the bodies don’t dig too well when they’re blind, but Benny clears his throat, which means he’s about to say something.

“Hey,” he murmurs gently, in his voice like honey. Dean closes his eyes. He almost can imagine he’s somewhere else to the sound of Benny’s voice, somewhere above ground, somewhere with a real sun, real water, and Sam. Sam’s skin that’s nearly too hot to touch, stretched taut over the tempered rage of muscle. “I’d say we make pretty good partners, brotha,” Benny says. 

Dean drags his hand through his hair, and it stands up with the thick black of Leviathan. “Yeah,” he rasps. “Yeah, I’d say we do.” 

There’s a moon in purgatory, or what looks like one. Big, blue-grey. Hangs in the tarry sky, illuminates the juts and hollows of Benny’s face. Dean stares at the moon. It is easier than staring at what the moon does to Benny’s face, how it softens him, blurs his edges, makes him this hazy thing, like Dean is peering at him though a film of tears. 

“You’re thinking,” Benny says in his voice like blown glass. Dean feels a hand on the inside of his elbow, cold from clutching metal. He flinches, but doesn’t pull away. “You got that far away look. Like you’re imagining some place better than this world between worlds.” 

_This world between worlds_ echoes inside of Dean. Slow, rough. Rocks in a tumbler, polished into something semi-precious. Not home. Just the resounding echo of it. 

There are lips at Dean’s pulse; they try and slow it. The scruff of Benny’s beard scrapes along Dean’s jawline, behind his ear, along the tendons in his throat and Dean sighs into it, tilts against the only stability in a place of uncertain realities. Black drips from Dean’s elbow. Benny catches it with his thumb, wipes it up with his sleeve. It’s a clumsy embrace, but Dean could turn it into fucking amongst corpses, it could shift that quickly. Semi-precious stones back into dirk and rocks. 

Even through his cyelids, Dean can see the maybe-moon. “Dunno if all this is real, Benny. Dunno how long I’ve been stuck in this margin, if it really even is a margin. If the before existed...if there is some after we’re headin’ towards or if we’re just truckin’ for the sake of truckin’. I don’t know.” Dean stops talking, feeling like there’s a dry something caught in his throat, choking him. Benny kisses his Adam’s apple, the tip of his tongue warm and wet between his lips and against Dean’s skin. 

“What else are we gonna do?” Benny whispers, hands against the back of Dean’s skull, where he kneads hair crusted with blood. “We stop, we die. We keep going...maybe we live. I think that maybe is worth it all.” 

Benny’s hope is astounding. It rings like something foreign in Dean, a language he stopped speaking long ago, even before the devil took his brother, even before his life was slicked with undying black. He laughs dryly against Benny’s brow, smells iron and death. “Worth it all,” Dean repeats, because he hasn’t wondered if something had worth it so long. You don’t question worth where Dean’s from. You do it anyway, because if you stop, the weight of the universe crushes you into nonexistence. 

“Stop thinking,” Benny tells Dean, eyes kind, a blue that matches his voice, warm, drowning. “You think too much, my brotha.” He pushes their mouths together. He tastes of iron and death. It’s a heavy kiss, Benny’s kisses are like his voice, like his eyes. Molasses sweet, slow, the kind of kiss Dean used on girls in high school when he wanted them to think they loved him, the toe-curling kind, the heart-stopping kind. The kind of kiss that’s intended to stop someone from thinking. 

Dean can’t stop thinking. He thinks of Sam. Thinks that Sam never kisses him like this, that he and Sam have probably never kissed soft, or slow, or without teeth. Kissing Sam is always metallic, their hands are always fisted in the other’s hair, they are always coming apart at the seams, kissing in between screaming at each other, in between the near snapping of bones. And here, here, in this world between worlds, Benny wants him to _stop thinking_. 

Dean used to think that he was broken beyond repair. Now, he knows it with certainty. With Benny’s hands on him, Benny thinking he can _heal_ him, cure his pain, smooth his creases, keep him from _thinking_ , that this is all _worth_ something, Dean knows more surely than ever that he is too cracked to ever work into a whole again. That Sam is the only one broken as irreparably, the only one who can share the well of his pain, drown in the same black waters. 

He kisses Benny back, though. He licks the roof of his mouth, tongue lost and longing for answers as it bumps blindly against another, toe-curling, heart-stopping. He grips Benny’s shoulders, lets his jacket get pushed off of his own, onto the earth and its oil-spill blackness spattered over leaves like acid rain. He rubs palms over Benny’s chest, under his stained white shirt, up his back. And it feels good. All of it, good like a fantasy, good like it he’s imagining it, like this couldn’t exist in the real world, the before world, any world that is not a world between worlds. It can exist here, where Dean does not have time to be broken because he’s too busy breaking things. 

Benny breaks the kiss, looks up at Dean with wide blue eyes, a wider smile. Dean doesn’t know how Benny can smile in a place like purgatory. Benny’s thumb drags across Dean’s lower lip, salty with sweat, ancient and rotten with Leviathan. “Such a damn, pretty thing. Dean. Never would have thought there was something pretty as you here.” 

Dean closes his eyes, stunned by too much blue. He longs for the hardness of Sam, the weight and the massive stretches of impenetrable pain. The smooth jaw, because even when they’re on the road and the razor’s dull, Sam’s meticulous about shaving. The smell of his unwashed clothes, the fierceness of his grip as it crushes Dean against a wall, the ground, his own chest. The blood in his veins, the blood in his mouth. Dean’s blood, Sam’s blood, doesn’t matter. Same stuff. 

Dean’s not even sure his life with Sam was real. The fury of it, the pain of it. It left holes that still gape in Dean’s flesh, but did he create it? Imagine it to save him from the forever-holding patterns of Purgatory, the endlessness of waiting, not belonging, finding the first thing you can lean against and letting it consume you? 

Breath shudders out of Dean, onto Benny’s lips. His eyes are still shut, but he can imagine the blue of his eyes, the blue of the maybe-moon. “How do if I even know you’re real?” he hears himself saying, hands roving over Benny’s arms, leaving handprints of soot-black. 

“You don’t, brotha,” Benny laughs, mouth soft, swollen, warm on the pout of Dean’s lower lip. “but what else are we gonna do? We stop, we die. We keep going, maybe we live. I think that maybe is worth it all.” 

The air smells ancient with death, with things stuck between life and death, consummation and loneliness. The Leviathan bodies are beginning to stir awake, and soon they’ll be readhering, healing their wounds. _Worth it_ , Dean thinks, and realize he doesn’t know what anything is worth anymore.


End file.
